Word: thurberism
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...White's sane and salty One Man's Meat ($2.50). Ludwig Bemelmans, a first-rate light storyteller with a surpassing light style, criticized human foibles with a sweet smile in I Love You, I Love You, I Love You ($2.50). But it remained for Humorist James Thurber, reporting on A.D. 1942!s general state of affairs in My World - And Welcome to It ($2.50), to pay the year off most succinctly and devastatingly. "Man," he said, "would seem to be slowly slipping back to all fours...
There is no Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis in the book; but Dreiser's effects depend on cumulative mass, and Lewis' great talents were not for creative but for reportorial writing. Unfortunately, there is no Scott Fitzgerald, either. The editors also went wrong on Thurber and Willa Gather, who deserved better selections. Southern writers are perhaps too generously treated. With these flaws, it remains a solid anthology. Among the selections...
...Author Thurber sought refuge in France just before the downfall. (He made his first mistake by giving "a book on government by M. Léon Blum [former Socialist Premier now imprisoned at Portalet Fortress in the Pyrenees] ... to a French steward on the Ile de France, who turned out to be a Royalist.") He also made the mistake of getting a phrase book to use in France. "Each page has a list of English expressions [with] French translations . . . alongside." Author Thurber learned to say: "I have left my glasses (my watch) (a ring) in the lavatory." In moments...
...mate on Bill, the polar bear. "She would fiddle with doilies, empty ash trays, wash out his briar pipe with soap and water. . . . When she started hanging his ties on a patented, nickel-plated cedarwood tie rack [with] an automatic clip-shift tie release," Bill murdered her. Author Thurber loves Bill...
This summer Thurber announced delightedly that he could read again. With a telescopic spectacle lens, thick as a bottle bottom, he had managed painfully to scan a short sentence in a novel...